Posts made by insomniac7809

Someone told me that the Cat Lawyer (not Ganymede) was a Milkshake Duck.

This made me sad, and also the fact that I immediately knew exactly what that meant means that maybe I need to go outside more.

(Okay it was YOU who interrupted my double posts responding to you)
@ganymede said in Sensitivity in gaming:

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Now, TTRPGs were, for a fairly long time, designed for by and for an audience of white men. (The MU* scene has been a lot more gender-balanced, in my experience, which might be an interesting topic to get into.)

Now this is a good talking point.

I am of the unsupported opinion that the MUSH scene is far more gender-balanced than the TTRPG world. Like, far more balanced. I would lay a wager that there are more women and LGBTQ+ folks playing on MUSHes than cis-hetero-men. I'd lay a heavy wager on that.

Why? I think it's fairly easy to figure out.

Yeah? I think it's really interesting, actually. @Aria and I met on an online game, but it was a JavaChat game hosted on White Wolf's website, with a very different 'channel' into the game that the MUSH scene, and the playerbase was predominately (not overwhelmingly) male. To the point that the sarcastic comments about crossplaying was almost exclusively discussing lesbians walking around in catsuits and negligee, rather than Yaoi prettyboys. I've wondered if women are the majority in the MU* games because they tend to come from freeform text RP, rather than the wargame scene.

...unless you mean that the TTRPG scene tends to be male-dominated because it's unwelcoming to women, in which case, yeah, depressingly obvious. I do think it's made a lot of headway since the days when @Aria was basically offered free gaming space in a game store if she'd run "talk to a live girl" games to draw business, but yeah.

To me, this is why policing is so very important. Like, way more important than I ever thought it would be. I can honestly say that of my near 25 years playing the past decade has been the most enjoyable. It's not because I have abandoned World of Darkness games -- okay, that may be part of it? -- but it is because the people that I have run into have taught me so much about ... well, everything.

It's important to me that LGBTQ+ folks have a place to be LGBTQ+ without fear. It's important that women aren't stalked or harassed on these games. I may be one of the toughest old birds out there when it comes to bullshit but that does not mean everyone is or should be. On this board, I'm happy to talk and share with people with divergent views from mine because I know I'll learn something new along the way, no matter how dry, acerbic, and condescending I am.

Gaming is good. It's really good. And to keep it that way, taking an extra step towards making the hobby better for others? That's a good thing.

It is. Gaming is good. And the chance to meet people through gaming is also good. In 2021 (I said "2020" above, it's been a month you'd think I'd get that) the ability to meet people from literally anywhere in the world is better than it's been in any time in human history, and that's a really, really good thing.

Which is why--besides the "irresponsible" bit I said above, which I do stand by--I do think it's important to be careful with material depicting other people and cultures. If someone comes into what is, mostly, a "men's space" or a "white space" and sees that they're represented as an ugly caricature of a person, I don't blame them if their response is "fuck this like the gold medalist fucklympian at the 2021 Fuckistan Fucklympics." So they lose gaming, and we lose someone who could be part of our thing and maybe give us some new perspective. Everyone loses.

***tangential, sexual assault***

So, as these sorts of spaces start to open up beyond the groups that have dominated them, it can be tricky for some of us to find the boundaries. And sure, sometimes people are going to place their boundaries in a place that's not reasonable, at least for the social circle. People do that. But, it's so very, very often the case that when some of us think that "this was always fine before, suddenly this is a problem," it's more accurately "this was always a problem for a whole lot of people, I just didn't have to hear about it." That's really what so much of the whole thing is with "sensitivity readers" and the like, listening to people and behaving in a way that considers others. Like any social interaction.

People mentioned how a lot of the sex comedies in the nineties would be unacceptable these days. (Molly Ringwald wrote a while ago on watching Breakfast Club with her granddaughter and seeing herself being the target of all that adorable sexual assault by the guy she falls in love with at the end.) There's been a lot of pushes toward inclusivity in SF writing and video games, making them less of a space by and for cishet white guys. And then we've been getting the backlash, with people trying to make SFF and video games stay men's spaces.

That's why I was quite so vitriolic about the video linked at the start of this discussion. I do think it's a discussion worth having (God, I hope it is, or this would be a hell of a way to spend my Thursday afternoon) even if I've made my stance fairly clear (God, I hope this all makes some kind of sense). The channel, though, is part of a whole internet ecosystem of gamer guys who take any video game protagonist who isn't a generically-rugged brown-haired guy in his thirties or any female character that doesn't give them a half chub as soon as she juggles onto the screen as a personal attack and proof that gaming is being ruined by SJWs. Even though it actually doesn't hurt them at all if women are made more welcome as gamers. Anyone capable of uploading a video about how making Tifa's tits smaller is Orwellian thought policing has access to infinite CGI titties at any waking moment of their lives. They're mad that they aren't being exclusively catered to.

@greenflashlight said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Reminder for context that Louis CK is not canceled. Despite everything he's done, he was greeted with a standing ovation when he returned to standup barely a year later, and he's currently in the middle of a sold-out international tour.

I mention this to explain why I have absolutely no patience with anyone who complains about being "canceled," because it never means what they pretend it means. It means they think they're so special it's unjust for them to suffer consequences when they spend a lifetime being shitty to people.

Oh, absolutely. I kind of glossed over this in my rambling, but I did say that the worst offenders with the widest reach are the ones who suffer least from people trying to hold them accountable. CK is on shitlists for being an actual sexual predator, not for anything in his routines, and as you say he is not "cancelled" in any meaningful sense.

As I said, the only people who really seem to be subjected to "cancelling" are small creators, and mostly the ones who are working in a more "social justice" space, where that sort of reputation can actually hurt them. (Thinking of stuff like requires_hate's mobs back when.) People who are willing can make being "cancelled" a YouTube career.

Other than that... the only real "cancelation" I can think of was the Dixie Chicks.

@ganymede said in Sensitivity in gaming:

@insomniac7809

As an amateur humorist, I appreciate your take on this.

{...]
Anyhow, yeah. Sensitivity is important. Satire and social criticism is good if you're clearly punching up and not spiking down on the oppressed at the same time.

(Double posting because I started writing my last post, wandered off, the posts didn't load, and I missed this one. Unless someone else posted while I was typing this up and following your links, in which case it isn't a double post.)
(ADDED BEFORE SUBMITTING: As long as it wound up taking me to write this out, it seems likely someone did, but I'm not checking.)

Yeah, it's a thorny issue all around.

Even beyond the issue of how someone feels around the rest of his other work, someone can be solid on a topic they're comfortable on and misstep when they branch out. I've had some personal experience with black coworkers who were very thoughtful and considered on race relations topics, more... iffy when it came to stuff with women, and, uh, let's say struggling when it came to LBGTQ issues. (A couple stockroom conversations I walked in on between my gay and straight black coworkers had me announcing "if HR asks I wasn't here for any of this.")

I definitely agree that the line between "observation" and "stereotype" can be a tricky one. Hell, that job was a shoe store, I worked there for eight years. For most of the time I was the only straight guy who worked outside of the stockroom. I'd point that out for a laugh. ("I thought it was a little strange, and then I said it out loud and heard myself.") Obviously the joke was based on stereotypes, that working at a shoe store mostly appealed to gay men and women. Is it harmful to joke about? I mean, I still think it's funny, I hope it isn't. How many people in creative/ theater/ RP spaces I've moved in are queer or neurodivergent, I think that can be a point to make as long as I'm not making them the butt of the joke.

So, like. Out of the linked routines, "Don't Ask, Don't Tuck" was... I mean, I don't know that it was hateful or anything, but it seemed pretty lazy and frankly not very funny. The one about Jenner, though, that one I'd say is "irresponsible" in the same sense that I used in my above post. The basis of the joke is pretty much the idea that people can be turned queer if they (or, say, their parents) aren't careful about their behavior or surroundings. It's a real idea that causes real harm. Which doesn't mean it's not an idea that can be joked about, but I do think that making it the punchline is a shitty thing to do. No one's really going to get the idea from a SNL routine, but it can still reinforce the attitude that it's true.

And, of course, I'm cis, so this is just my thoughts and take. If the "don't ask, don't tuck" joke is going to be taken worse than I think it would, I don't think I'm the person to say. Not that every trans person is, or can be, the definitive authority--hell, in this post I used the -Q on LGBT and used the word "queer" to refer to non-cishet, and there's definitely some disagreement on whether or not that's still a word that counts as a slur. It's true that you can't please everyone, y'know? But a given trans person probably has a better idea than I do about whether the joke goes beyond the pale. (Fun fact: "beyond the pale" is a reference to the inhuman savagery of the Irish. See, "the pale" is an archaic term for a wall, like the ones set up around the English fortifications.)

So, all that said, people are going to have their opinions but usually I think the concerns about being cast eternally into the darkness of Cancellation for a single misstep are taken pretty far. (It wasn't tasteless jokes that got Louis CK on a lot of people's shitlist, it was years of using his position of power to make women watch him masturbate.) Most of the time, people do seem to get a lot of chances to do better, and the real backlash doesn't start to come until they octuple down and treat every "could you not" as a dare to take it further. People were pointing out Rowling's tendency to like or boost transphobic material on social media for years before she masked-off with her TERF views.

Not to say there aren't cases of people digging up material from years back, or making it up wholecloth, to smear people they dislike, whether out of some vendetta or a sincere belief that the person they're going after should be deplatformed. (Or one leading to the other.) And, unfortunately, small or independent creators are a lot more vulnerable to this than the people whose views have a lot more reach. I could say this isn't any different from other ways people have organized socially to silence people they dislike, and it would be true, but it does feel insufficient. People shouldn't do this, and they definitely shouldn't brigade or harass based on this. I wish I could say something better about this.

...Christ, this is a lot of words to talk about how there's a lot going on with all this and I don't have great answers. I could've actually been writing something. I hope someone gets something out of all this.

(Also, a bit of a "well technically:" there's plenty to criticize Democrats over as far as LGBT advocacy, but (and I realize this is one of those "anything before 'but' doesn't actually count" things, but I do think it's significant (recursion!)) while DADT banned openly gay servicemembers, before its passage the US military banned gay members from serving at all. "They asked, I lied," as a veteran professor of mine put it (theater class, natch). There wasn't enough support for a full repeal of the ban on gay servicemembers under Clinton, so while DADT was homophobic, it was a faltering, clumsy step toward gay rights, not against them.)

@arkandel said in Sensitivity in gaming:

On the other hand I can see a gamerunner who makes that 1000 Nights MUSH with the very best intentions getting blasted because they didn't read multiple sources and dissertations to properly depict the staggeringly complex politics, racial tensions and socio-economic issues of the time so that the wrong people are depicted as villainous. Hell, if someone perceives it that way and suddenly the gamerunner is being portrayed as wildly racist on MSB.

So. I mean.

I get what you're saying, but I think the idea that someone is going to get blasted for not fully integrating the complexities of the socioeconomic structure of the Abbasid Caliphate into their 1001 Arabian Nights-themed fantasy setting is overblown.

Like, maybe someone somewhere might write that up as a shitty take, but I think most people are more than happy to accept a simplified version of the real world for fiction and playability. (Hell, I've spent years as the guy saying that if I need to read an ethnography to start chargen, I probably just won't. Having simple hooks/deals to start getting into play is a good thing!)

I think that, much more likely, complaints would come if the setting has less to do with Arabian history, or even Arabian fiction or folklore, than it does with racist European stereotypes about exotic slave girls and malicious, effete nobles strangling each other with silk rope.

I get that people might want to run something other than fictionalized modern-day New England or Middle Ages Europe pastiche, but if the setting doesn't interest you enough to learn more than the most theme park stereotype version of the historical inspiration, why would you want to run a game in that setting?

@derp said in Sensitivity in gaming:

I mean, I get that in a sort-of general principle way? But like -- I'm not sure that that's a great idea either. That would be like saying 'an American' gets to decide whether Squidbillies is a fantasy comedy based on specific tropes/stereotypes or a horrible slander against Appalachian persons.

I mean, there is something to be said about how lower-income white people are the last acceptable target of mockery, and one would hope that someone writing about Appalachian characters would have more knowledge or experience of their subject to draw on than having heard jokes about toothless cousin-fuckers.

I think the "who decides" question is just framing it under the idea that the goal is to never upset anyone ever with anything, but usually what the people talking about sensitivity readers are saying isn't that at all.

Not every American is going to be an expert on every American culture group or agree on every point about what is or isn't offensive. I do feel like an American living abroad could probably tell the difference between something that relates to Americans and something that's based off of racist media based off of shitty stereotypes about Americans. That's really all most talk of sensitivity readers is about; helping people sort out the difference between what they know about other cultures, and what's junk they got from white people imitating other white people making caricatures. Not "how can I avoid offending anyone ever," more "is this talking about Asian people like Ronny Chieng or am I doing Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's."

Ultimately, the people who get to decide what is 'too much' are the consumers of the media, based on their own tastes and preferences as social mores change. People can certainly be advocates for change, but I'm not sure that anyone gets to be "the arbiter of how much is too much" when it comes to things built on, ultimately, stereotypes, whether accurate or not.
Accuracy certainly isn't the point most of the time, and the offensive nature of something is so subjective as to be almost a not-helpful metric.

Well, yes. Any sort of creative work is always going to be a conversation between artist and audience, and a collaborative creation is going to involve a communication between the creators.

The answer to "how much is too much" is always all of the creators and all of the audience, and yes, they're going to disagree. People are allowed to like it. People are allowed to dislike it. People are allowed to be offended. (There's a good chance some people were meant to be offended.) People are allowed to make shitty, CHUDdy YouTube videos whining about pronouns and upload them to trick reasonable people into thinking they're making a salient point.

This general process is what finding an audience is. And just by that metric, one of the things a creator should consider is who they want to appeal to. Or, since a lot of the fundamental draws of a lot of work are near universal, how broadly they want to appeal. The latest Wulfenstein games, for instance, aren't going to hold much appeal to Nazis, because one of the selling points of the Wulfenstein games is the chance to sneak up behind a Nazi at the toilet and drown him in his own piss. (Also known as "having some wholesome fun for the whole family.") The work is fairly hostile to Nazis.

Now, TTRPGs were, for a fairly long time, designed for by and for an audience of white men. (The MU* scene has been a lot more gender-balanced, in my experience, which might be an interesting topic to get into.) That doesn't mean it was anything like impossible for women to enjoy RPGs, plenty of them always have, but plenty of others have been turned away by material that presents women entirely in terms of how they relate to men. When the female gender is represented, essentially, by adolescent wank fantasy, that is often taken as hostile to women. When RPG designers, especially in the nineties, made conscious efforts to be more inclusive in their writing, the balance of the hobby had some major shifts. Avoiding making a work hostile to people outside of your culture is only a good thing for finding an audience.

On top of that, I will go so far as to say that people have a responsibility to avoid spreading harmful ideas with their work. You Are Not Immune to Propaganda and all. Not that a creator should be pouring over every passage to ensure that it encourages the development of proper moral values, but people do, in fact, take ideas and attitudes from media they consume, especially on topics they have no personal experience with (see: how many people think you get one phone call from jail, something that was literally just made up). So while I don't think that, say, anyone is going to really make any life choices because of how WotC presented the Vistani in Curse of Strahd, I do think that presenting an obvious expy of the Romani as a bunch of magical criminal drunks serves to strengthen negative attitudes and stereotypes about a real group of people, and it was irresponsible of them to do it.

@mietze Yeah, taking the scope a good bit beyond RPGs, but...

So I feel like there's a lot of cultural cachet with people who are willing to push boundaries, speak truth to power, defy censorship. And that's not a bad thing! We've got plenty of art that speaks in marginalized voices that the world would, I'd argue, be better off without,

(And yeah, a lot of prurient edgy stuff that I like, regardless of artistic quality or message.)

And yeah, @Ganymede is quite right that good comedy is almost always going to be offensive to someone.

But I see a difference between making cutting observations about your society and lived experience versus trying to claim the label of "brave" by saying *-ist stuff that some people think you shouldn't say. Satire requires clarity of intent and all that, and doing stuff like, IDK, early-2000s Comedy Central or Adult Swim where the joke was just racist jokes with the extra layer of "oh but you're not supposed to say that!"

Hell, talking about comedians, Jerry Seinfeld had two gay joke routines that kind of come to mind. There was a whole episode where people started thinking Jerry and George were in a relationship, and the main thrust of the joke was "we have to prove that we're not gay! Not that there's anything wrong with that!"--that is, the joke is that they're properly tolerant but obviously it's a bad thing if people think they're gay, which is a legit cultural commentary and observation to make. Then recently (well, "recently" in that it was five years ago, fucking time progressing where does it get off) he went on Seth Meyers to complain about political correctness because a bit of his bombed where he compared scrolling on your phone to looking like "a gay French king." The whole thrust of his, well, whingefest was that it was the PC attitudes that kept college students from appreciating his brilliance, not because the joke was kind of shitty and a bunch of college kids in '15 honestly didn't see anything funny about scrolling on your phone or being gay. (No matter what a big deal he was in the 90s, not only aren't people owed an audience, they definitely aren't owed a laugh.)

Also compare the shows of Dave Chappelle and Carlos Mencia. Chappelle actually walked away at the height of his career because he thought his observations about race were being taken as just racist jokes, or giving white kids license to tell racist jokes. Mencia was more than happy to just be the guy who tells jokes where the punchline is racism but it's okay because he's Hispanic.

@lordbelh said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Say you put your fantasy setting in a arab inspired setting. How much research is expected? And how much from the game maker, and how much from the players? Who gets to decide what is appropriate, or too cliche, or downright offensive? Would you put a setting there at all, rather than a generic western culture approximation?
I think that's the sort of convo @Arkandel was looking for? Or I might be wrong about that, too. I'm not known for my high batting average.

So, okay, looking at a question like this...

The question of "who gets to decide" is a thorny one, I'll grant that. Not everyone is going to come to the same answer, obviously.

A first step kind of has to be "someone Arabic," which is why the people being mocked in the bad video are talking about sensitivity readers. Not that every Arab is going to have the same answer. But, I mean, it's 2020; you can probably find someone on the internet who's actually a part of the culture you're depicting to tell you if you're doing a fucky.

Barring that... I mean, "how much research" is kind of a tricky subject, but I feel like "fucking, y'know, some" is still a step beyond what a lot of people do. No one's expecting a dissertation, any more than western fantasy settings actually resemble historical Europe, but like, for an Arabian-inspired setting, just figuring out that "Persian" and "Arab" aren't the same thing and a harem isn't what you think it is would be a step beyond. Read up a bit on the history--not like getting a graduate degree, but at least a bit. Maybe even read some histories or just fiction actually by members of the culture you're taking inspiration from, instead of just white men writing up their orientalist fantasies with one hand.

@mietze Yeah, and kind of riffing on that... for all the talk about oversensitivity, I mean, it's weird how often the people who are being silenced get to complain about it on late night talk shows or national news, y'know?

People keep asking, like, "how can I know nobody will be offended" and yeah, that's not a thing. Look around the internet for discussion on any media property, you're sure to find a few truly baffling takes. But that doesn't mean there's no legitimate criticism to be had, or that people shouldn't try to be thoughtful and responsible with their work, y'know?

@arkandel Yeah. Even with a TT game, playing with friends, playing with coworkers, and playing at a convention are all going to be really different sorts of experiences and expectations.

But all of them allow for a good bit more in-person communication and specificity than a MU* can. Not that a MU* doesn't need to take player comfort or consideration seriously, just that it can't have the same degree of "everyone gets to make these decisions" that a TT game does. It has to be a certain degree of "this is what we're doing, feel free to hop on."

Not that this is entirely absent in TT. "I don't want to play in a game where secondary school aged teenagers are sexualized, hurt, or killed" is a perfectly reasonable line to have, but someone who does that and tries to play Monsterhearts really only has themselves to blame.

So, yeah, there is a conversation to be had here about how to handle this sort of thing in games, above and beyond how bad the video that sparked it was. (Which was, I want to be clear here: bad. Not gonna go back and read whatever I said in the wee hours last night, so gonna put that out. Bad arguments in bad faith to make a bad video.)

But beyond talking about how bad the bad video is, there is some meat to get into here. Especially in how it relates to MU*s.

In-person games have a lot of ways to handle content; I've got some fondness for "lines and veils" and "the X-card." "Lines and veils" gives people the chance to set up "lines," which are things they don't want to deal with at all in game (say, "no spiders" or "no sexual violence") and "veils" which are things that can happen in the fiction but they don't want to be 'on-screen' (so, for instance, someone could put "torture" behind a veil, and while there could be torture happening in the plot it wouldn't be a scene focus or get any graphic description. (The scorecard @Carma has there looks to be based on the same lines.) The X-card is something anyone can play to veto an element that was just brought up, we retcon it and move on. ("'From the pit, you see the leg of an enormous spider start to-' 'X-card.' '-an enormous snake start to emerge!'" "'I start to cut off the rude shopkeep's-' 'X-card, no you don't.'")

The thing is, these are a lot more workable in smaller sit-down games with friends. With MUs, where it is a good bit more ad-hoc and with a broader group (and, yeah, where you frankly can't have the same assumptions of good faith that you have in a smaller in-person game), it does get to be a thornier issue. Twice as much so when it comes to any game with horror elements, where violating social norms is kind of key to the whole experience. Anything trying to appeal to as wide of an audience as a given MU* can't really work with the same degree of "everyone gets veto power" as a smaller game with friends.

Setting a "rating" for the game is a good first step, although it does come with the issue that ratings are kinda bullshit. (Fun fact: Taxi Driver was given an NC-17 over the climactic violence scene, so Scorsese kept sending "recut" versions of the film to try to get it down to an R. Thing was, he didn't cut a goddamn thing, he just desensitized the NCAA by showing them the same ultraviolence over and over until they decided it was an R rating.)

Putting out some hard rules across the games is generally a good idea, I think. As well as respecting players who ask that topics or details be "veiled," more or less as outlined above; even if it's a bit much to ask that "violence against children" not be a thing in any aspect of the setting, it's perfectly reasonable for a player to ask that it not be given detailed description or focus. It doesn't need to just be "players," either; I know one of the GMs on a L&L game has said they won't have a scene where a horse explicitly dies. You can't have a world where the cavalry charge is the height of military technology but no horses are ever killed by violence, but it's perfectly acceptable to say that they don't want to GM a scene like that or give/be subjected to descriptions of it.

Give players a chance to bow out for content just the same as we have to accept that sometimes real life obligations take precedence over being available for pretendy funtime events that our characters should be present for. Be willing to gloss over detail rather than lurid prose about things that make people upset.

You can't reasonably have a game of a hundred, or even like twenty, people where everyone gets complete veto power over anything else that happens in-game (and while content in one TT group is basically only the business of that group, characters in a MU* interact outside the scope of a given PRP).

As far as people using bad faith to try to escape consequences to their character... I feel like the only thing to do here is work out with the player/s involved what the consequences are, at least in broad strokes, and move on. Maybe do one or more abstracted rolls to determine outcome without getting into detail. Real people and their feelings are more important than make-believe consistency, but a MU* is by definition something that has to have a certain degree of fictional 'reality' holding together, or everyone's play experience suffers.

Much more than a TT group, a MU* has to have some points where the fictional reality of the setting takes precedence over personal comfort, and the answer has to be "take it or leave it."

Yeeeeeah, sorry Arkandel but I'm like... five minutes into that video and I'm going to give myself a migraine from rolling my eyes so hard.

Like, a minute in, he's giving a pitch-perfect recital of the Thermian argument--link to the video that coined the phrase, but for those who don't want to watch a five-minute video, the "Thermian argument" is presenting the fictional in-universe justification for a plot or setting element as a response to critique, as though the speaker was a Thermian from Galaxy Quest. (If you haven't seen Galaxy Quest I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul, and the Thermians are a species of alien who don't understand that fiction exists, so when they have to deal with a conquering warlord coming to exterminate them, they kidnap the actors of a Star Trek expy to save them. Also watch Galaxy Quest it's hilarious and also legitimately the best Star Trek movie ever made.)

Point is: he tries to brush aside criticism of the racial problems with orcs by citing the in-universe explanation of how the orcs are actually elves who'd been tortured and degraded by Morgoth. Someone who knew Tolkien better, though, would know that this was only one of several explanations he toyed with through the years, although it's the closest that's come to a "canonical" answer. Other thoughts included the idea that Morgoth created the orcs as a mockery of Men and Elves, but that ran into the issue that evil, in Tolkien's conception, can only corrupt but not create. Another was that orcs aren't really alive at all, just matter set into motion by Morgoth and Sauron's will, but that has the issue with how they're presented in the books as individuals with personal desires, grudges, and so on. The thing about being corrupted elves is the best one he came up with, but as mentioned, that runs into the issue that corrupted elves should, then, be redeemable.

What all that word word words amounts to, though, is Tolkien trying to reconcile his cosmology and Catholic worldview with what orcs actually are, which is: something that looks like a person only hideous and inherently evil. (The letter mentioned in the video and the article referenced, incidentally, has Tolkien describing the orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." "Mongol-types," here, being a reference to the archaic racial classifications, Caucasioid, Mongolod, and Negroid. You can tell that orcs are monsters because they look like really ugly Asian people.)

So no, some post-hoc worldbuilding to explain why the degraded and repulsive Mongoloid horde of subhumans are coming to slaughter, enslave, and rape the virtuous Normans and Saxons who stand against them doesn't actually make it stop being some really racist tropes. And then we can get into the D&D presentation of orcs, where they're physically powerful but mentally dim tribal creatures with an inherently savage disposition, lead by chiefs and bolstered by shamans or witch doctors to provide spellcasting ability. Incidentally, Gygax explained to D&D players that killing orc babies was moral behavior because "nits make lice," a word for word quote from when Colonel John Chivington sent the US Army to kill Cheyanne children at Sand Creek, Colorado.

(Oh, hey, and he brings up the Drow, too. The elves who have black skin because they turned evil. Like the Curse of Ham.)

Like, I'm not saying "cancel Tolkien" or "cancel Gygax" (although seriously Gary the fuck), but it's frankly some willful blindness to pretend that the "evil races" in fantasy and D&D don't have some fucked-up relationships to the real world. (This wasn't a discovery made on Tumblr, either. Michael Moorecock touched on a good bit of this in his essay "Starship Stormtroopers" in 1978, and The Iron Dream was written in 1974, with the conceit that it was a classic heroic pulp novel written by Adolph Hitler after his political ambitions didn't work out.)

Okay, back into this... six minutes whining about how someone ate a ban on RPG.net because people were saying to talk to an actual Native American before writing Native Americans into a published setting, and this guy gave a whole thing about how that's hard. Neato.

Two minutes complaining about pronouns. Rock the fuck on.

Okay, cool, and now we're onto PETA... oh he's saying that considering marginalized people who might be in your audience is exactly like PETA talking about how we shouldn't use animal characteristics as insults because he's made the whole argument around a strawman that people are saying that literally no one should ever be offended by anything so "what will the PETA people think" is exactly the same as "is this being racist and will that drive minorities out of my hobby."

Right, fuck this, tapping out.

@Aria I feel like this might be something you want to check out.

@too-old-for-this Even then, I feel like a question about what grans value to a temporary existence in an uncaring universe is a bit heavy for a job application.

Achieving something of lasting importance is the highest goal in life
Strongly Agree - Agree - Slightly Agree - Slightly Disagree etc

motherfucker I'm doing a questionnaire for a phone center job and you're getting way too existential for this bullshit

Text messages were a mistake.

@roz said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:

Mira Furlan from Babylon 5

"In the place where no shadows fall."

No age at all, goddamn.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

While I've never been shy about giving my unsolicited opinion on the topic of how other people should be running their own websites, I do want to offer my sincere thanks to you for putting your unpaid time and unappreciated efforts into hosting and managing a site for myself and all my fellow overopinionated underqualified loudmouths, so thank you for the time you spent managing things here, and to everyone else who you leave all this to.

All the security on job application sites.

Is there a rash of people going around and applying for jobs on other people's behalf? Is that a problem people have been having?

(Yes I know it's because of all the personal information still annoying.)

@macha When @Aria and I got married in State College, we scheduled our wedding around the game weekends.

(It only sounds crazy to people who never lived there.)

@macha said in Why are there so many MUs set in Maine?:

@sixregrets

This made me think of visiting my boyfriend at State College, PA (yeeears ago) and it was an Eagles game day - the drunk frat boys screaming E - A- G- E- S - EAGLES EAGLES EAGLES.

And every time they were out on their balcony screaming and misspelling it, I couldn't stop laughing.

That sounds right, and also Eagles games are penny ante shit compared to Penn State games in that town. WE ARE!

@rucket said in Why are there so many MUs set in Maine?:

to booing Santa

ONE FUCKING TIME

@ominous For what it's worth, if I was unclear, my issue is in no sense with people who open up early access to start some cash flow and outsource some QA. "People who want a first look can pay to get it, and we get some testing in a less controled environment than our QA department."

Just, when it comes to release day, I'm just of the apparently outdated opinion that the game should be finished, not "finished*". Like, if there's some bugs that slipped past QA and the magic of a series of tubes can fix it after launch, fine. Hell, with modern AAA massive open world procedural whatnot, I'll even grant that sheer probability means there's gonna be some issues that turn up when you have millions of players instead of one overworked QA department. That's different from a release day game where most every reviewer has an opinion on how severe the bugs they ran into were.

And even from the pure profit motive (I'm under no "just world" delusions that good for consumers is always good for the company), I have to think a game company would be better off waiting for the big release day push until they had a working game. Like, talk to someone who pre-ordered ME: Andromeda or No Man's Sky, and then talk to someone who bought it a year after release, and they don't sound like they're talking about the same game. I would think that the good word of mouth would be more valuable than pushing a game out the door that gets held up forever as a case study of "what the fuck went wrong" even after there's a fixed game for everyone to ignore in favor of like three more rounds of hyped-up "ultra spectacular nylon bag edition" "finished*" game releases.

Not to get too snippy, but... to do... that...

When, exactly, did we collectively decide that "well, it's day one release" was an excuse for a game to be buggy?

Like, I realize we're past the days when cavemen needed to chisel the ones and zeroes immutably onto a kar-chrij to ship out, and the ability to go back and patch a finished game is on balance a good thing. Same with content expansions that don't need the physical media and shipping expenses you'd get with an expansion pack.

But I'm a bit peeved at the fact that this has been taken as license to, generally, treat release day as "super special open full-priced beta testing." Especially when combined with the industry's... focus? emphasis? unsettling fetish? of deluxe ultra preorder things.